Reflected Solar Radiances from Regional Scale Scenes

Abstract

A set of bi-directional reflectance models is presented for various atmospheric scene types. The models were composited from data collected from an aircraft platform in May-July 1979 during Summer MONEX. The space scale of the composited models is generally from 250 to 1000 km, which corresponds to the scale of interest in climate monitoring and modeling. Composite models for the following scene types are presented: the desert sands of the Saudi Arabian Empty Quarters, the Himalayan mountains, the Arabian Sea with the ever-present fair weather cumulus cloudiness, the semi-arid agricultural land surface of the Indian subcontinent under pre-monsoon conditions, broken middle and low level clouds over ocean, an altostratus cloud deck, and the broken pack-ice fields of Hudson Bay. Nearly all the models display a degree of anisotropy such that serious errors (10–100%) would result in the reflected flux density isotropically inferred from some of the reflected radiances. The features of many of the models are discussed, and all of the models are tabulated in the Appendix. One of the models for altostratus is explicitly compared with theory, and differences between the altostratus and broken cloud models agree with the differences between infinite and finite cloud theory. The models are also compared with models from previous studies. The agreement is generally good (∼100%rms) except in a few cases in which the disagreement may have resulted from natural scene variability or differences between the methods of data collection.